


Flowers and Stars

by Weddersins



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, BUT I CANT, Gen, angst angst angst, i just like sadness, i wish i could write happy things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 00:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14344302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weddersins/pseuds/Weddersins
Summary: The last moments of Anakin Skywalker.





	Flowers and Stars

The colors burn. Where there had only been shades of grey for so long, the blues in the eyes of the boy before him blaze.

Hair the color of sand at dusk - like his own, ages ago; and those blue eyes were ocean-deep. Fear and urgency tighten the lines of the boy’s face, his eyebrows knitted together. Sweatdrops beading in his hairline speak both to the boy’s fight against the Dark and the struggle of dragging his father’s corpse.

The curve of the boy’s jaw echoed an ageless woman; one he had tried to forget.

Anakin knew he had wasted this life. And now, it was done. The stinging pain of the unfiltered air comingled with shame and regret, the three elements burning holes in his empty chest. 

The boy stared at him so hopefully - No. No longer a boy. A man. His son, grown up without him.

The years gone to dust, and he now a dying body full of remorse. He was nothing more than bones and marrow; sewn into a framework that both sustained and imprisoned him. But the black helmet was behind him, removed by the flesh and metal hands of his son.

It was time.

Klaxons blare. Air swirls on skin it hadn’t touched in decades; breath bubbles and creaks in damaged lungs. Destruction all around him; inside of him; because of him.

It was time.

“Now... go, my son.” The escaping words turn to ash, and they clog his burning throat.

The face of the man turns boyish again, and sand swirls around them. In the dust there rises a little girl; fat-cheeked with brown hair. She’s held by a woman with stars in her dark hair - no, not stars; white flowers. The sand-haired boy kneels beside her feet, chubby fist buried in the hem of her dress. They are happy - he can feel it in the tips of non-existent fingers, in the joints of limbs long gone.

A life destroyed, for reasons which had never mattered.

“Leave me.” Gagging, the words spit themselves out. The only way. The boy must go. 

It was time.

Alarms blare, footfalls echo, a red light blinks above them. The ship is dying. He is, too.

The boy tightens his jaw; slackens it. “No.” Sand-colored hair wobbles as he shakes his head. “You’re coming with me. I’ll not leave you.” There was no guile in his words, only earnest longing. The steadfast desire of a son for the father he had been denied.

But the dark-haired woman sees him now. The white flowers glisten amid curls, and she puts their daughter on the ground beside her kneeling brother.

“I’ve got to save you.”

The ghost of the baby boy stares out of the features of the young man crouching before him. His sister is tucked protectively behind his back, unsure and unsteady.

Ocean eyes glisten, the crags of his son’s face cast red by alarm lights.

The woman smiles, holds out her hand. The stars blossom in her hair. She’s just a ghost; nothing but a whisper. But oh, her voice is music and he aches to listen.

 _Anakin_.  _I’ve missed you._

It was time - but not yet. With effort, he tears his gaze away from her to memorize the face of his son, still so full of hope.

It was that which had saved him, despite everything; the hopeful eyes of his wife mirrored in the pleading oceans of his son’s gaze. A moment’s flash of conviction; the strangling desire to turn back time. And he knew that both of their deaths would not - could not - stain his hands.

Anakin forced himself to speak, the words grating out from between pain-clenched teeth. “You already have... Luke. You were right. You were right about me.”

Steadfast in his boyish conviction, so sure had he been that the desiccated heart trapped in it's metal cage was still capable of beating for his son.

The little boy blends again with the man, the sands of time unknowable. His sister peeks around his shoulder, a childish motion. Despite the innocence of her actions her face was world-weary, the doe eyes and ringlet curls of infancy lost. The princess arrayed in white; a woman, a warrior with braids in her hair; her mother’s spit and spirit.

“Tell your sister... you were right.” The baby girl shrinks behind her brother again, her fears allayed by the hand of her mother. Then, that same hand reaches toward him again. 

It’s time. 

Anakin smiles at his son, muscles aching with the effort. His wife’s shadow overlaps their son’s body, her deep eyes set now in the face of the boy kneeling on the hard floor.

No. The man.

“Father.” Luke says, urgently. Siren-howls reverberate around them as colors swim and fade. Grey blurs to black, but the stars in her hair are murky-bright in the gloom. She’s close now, close enough to touch.

 _Padme_.

“I won’t leave you.” 

Luke is a memory, a still-beating heart echoing through the galaxy.

His wife’s head is on his chest, the stars in her hair dissolving into skin finally freed from it’s metal prison. They are made of dust in an ocean of stars, born into a galaxy a million miles away. And to there they return.


End file.
